Last Fables Post Mortem

Last week was the final chapter of Last Fables, and with it comes the end of regular weekly updates on this site. Now that the entire novel is available here and free to read, it felt like a good time to reflect on the story as a whole. What I've put together is a sort of post mortem, looking at what worked, what didn't work, and the lessons we've learned as a result. I hope that it's informative and interesting!

A Brief History of Last Fables

Before it's possible to discuss what we learned as a result of making Last Fables, I think it's necessary to first provide some context and history. The earliest version of the story that became Last Fables dates to around 2018. I was working alone at the time, and only generated fragments; there was no massive overarching outline or complete draft. Instead, it amounted to a few experimental scenes to try to get a feel for the characters and setting.

From our position here in the present, the existence of a person like the Man in the Gray Cloak seems impossible. To the average person, he is such a larger than life figure that he must surely be a myth.

He is not.

He was a man—unlike any other, true—and many of his deeds are an indisputable part of history. His early life is the subject of great dispute, but there is no doubt that he was the first person to take up dragon slaying without the help of a team. Or, at least, the first person to do so successfully.

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The most powerful mage to have ever lived met the most legendary hero to have ever lived and was seriously underwhelmed. He just really didn’t look the part. Rather than tall, blond, and handsome, he was average looking. Medium height, brown hair, a face that would have been forgotten if it wasn’t for his unkempt hair and beard. If he got a haircut, or shaved, and changed his clothes he could easily blend into a crowd and no one would remember him. His clothes were also a disappointment—for a man known as “the Man in the Gray Cloak,” she had expected something visually impressive. Embroidery, brocade, something. Instead it was tattered and mud-stained at the bottom and full of patched holes and sewn-up tears throughout.

A snippet of the very first experiment is shown above; although it differs from the final version of Last Fables in many ways, there are still some recognizable elements. The most obvious difference is that the characters are all human, but the Man in the Gray Cloak is clearly the basis for Tin as a legendary hero and slayer of monsters. The narration is from the perspective of a historian, writing long after the hero's great deeds were done and trying to sort between fact and fiction; this character became Eni. Originally, the story was supposed to take a form somewhat resembling that of Dune, where entries from the diaries of Princess Irulan, written after Paul Atreides comes to power, introduce each chapter and tease at the events that are to come in the story. The narrator in this story, however, would outlive the hero by a significant margin, and take up writing as an attempt to set the record straight centuries after facts had been exaggerated and amplified into myths.

I thought it'd be an interesting way to frame the story and provide ironic and poignant counterpoints between how the historian felt in the moment during her adventures with the Man in the Gray Cloak and how she felt writing about them hundreds of years later, but it never existed as anything more than an experiment. Like many story ideas I have, I played around with it for a bit and set it aside, not considering it again for several years.

When I came back to it, it was with a team and a new vision. The story would become an epic work of furry literature, the experiment expanded and built on until the bones were barely recognizable. We fleshed out a vast and intricate backstory for the setting as well as a massive and detailed outline. This was an exciting time, but it was also when a lot of the seeds for many of the problems we encountered with Last Fables were planted, beginning with the process itself.

Workflow Issues

With an outline for the first book ready and core elements of the setting established, work really began in earnest. Notably, Last Fables was still being written while the illustrations were being drawn, which was done with a good reason in mind. With so many illustrations to make, it would have taken a long time to finish them all if they weren't started until the book was completed and edited. However, the way that it was done ended up putting severe constraints on both the writing and the illustrating; the process made it difficult to make any major edits to either. Some relatively trivial changes were made and could be accommodated, such as the Woemaker's eye color changing from green to gold. Other visual enhancements were worked into the story, such as Eni's costume change partway through the book in order to give her a better-looking jacket. However, significant changes couldn't be made without wasting a huge amount of work in either writing or illustrating. It's easy to argue in retrospect that I should have been more willing to make such sacrifices while writing and editing, but in the moment I found it difficult and quite unappealing. I didn't want either illustrator to have labored in vain, and where the visuals didn't quite align with the story as written I always tried to consider whether it was possible for the story to change instead of the art. After all, if the story calls for a scene to take place in a rectangular room but the artist drew it as an oval shape, it's much easier to revise the words than it is the art. If, on the other hand, the action taking place within that room changes completely, then most of the art would need to be scrapped and redone.

For the majority of the book, I held myself to writing one new chapter every week. It's something that I had been able to do while writing fan fiction, and at the time I thought it was a reasonable thing to be able to do for a wholly original work. However, the demand for constant forward motion meant that the only way to successfully achieve that goal was to live almost completely in the present. Making any revisions or edits to previous chapters would, in addition to impacting the art as discussed above, destabilize the foundation on which new chapters were being written. As I didn't do any experiments for the new version of Last Fables prior to writing it, I was learning as I was going. The protagonists, in particular, started out sort of halfway between my original conception of them and what the outline demanded of them, and finding their voices really only happened as I wrote new chapters.

Characters and Plotting

Something that became obvious to me in retrospect while looking at the whole story is that it's really only Eni's story up until she finds Tin. Once Tin is introduced, which happens very early in the book, he seizes the initiative. From that point onward, it's largely the case that Tin makes things happen and Eni has things happen to her. They’re virtually inseparable, excluding one scene late in the book and for a brief period at the very end. There’s certainly nothing wrong with having characters spend time together, but it can potentially make Eni come across as too passive and not an active force in the narrative. 

Part of that, though, is not due to Eni herself or her personality, but due instead to Tin. Tin isn’t simply powerful from a narrative perspective; he’s powerful within the setting itself. As the holder of god-like power, there really isn’t anything in the story (until the very end) that poses any kind of threat to him. He chooses not to use his vast strength, which does help him have an interesting angle. However, it’s possible that his personality puts a damper on how interesting he could be. Tin spends most of the book stoic, showing little interest in speaking and having difficulty organizing his thoughts when he does. As this results in relatively little dialog between Eni and Tin, the narrative then turns to Eni’s own thoughts and the wordless ways in which Tin does communicate. I tried my best to make it interesting and engaging, but I can also understand why some readers felt Tin was dull if they expected more obvious and rich dialog between the two main characters.

With that being said, the rhythm of the two characters does get broken up late in the book with the appearance of Zathos. Zathos as a character provided some narrative potential in the form of disrupting the status quo, but I’m afraid I may not have capitalized on that potential to its fullest effect. Narratively, Zathos more or less appears out of nowhere and tells the protagonists what to do. This is efficient from a storytelling perspective, as it eliminated the need for a lot of meandering as Eni and Tin figure out what to do, but it may not be entirely satisfying and it contributes to the sense that Eni is not the master of her own destiny. As Zathos’s origins and master are never explained, with the monster exiting the narrative during Neira’s appearance.

Neira herself is, at least, subject to some setup prior to the grand reveal. There are many points, starting from almost the very first chapter of the book, that show that someone is watching Eni and Tin, someone powerful and capable of working at a distance. That Neira turns out to be a literal dragon, however, could perhaps have been better hinted at. The reveal was intended to be a shocking surprise, but it may also come across as too much too late in the story, with Neira herself providing a fair amount of exposition to explain things at the very end of the book.

The ending of Last Fables is one element that has been criticized by a few readers, and I think reasonably so. The book was designed to ratchet up the tension and the stakes over the course of the novel, but things end in a pretty grim state. Most of the named characters are killed, a city is destroyed with what is implied to be a massive loss of life, and an entire small country is in ruins. As for Eni and Tin, it can also be ambiguous to the reader if they’ve both somehow survived or if both are dead. That’s the sort of ending that can come across as a real downer, in addition to leaving the reader with more questions than answers.

Publishing Pitfalls

In its entirety, Last Fables: Fraudewolf is longer than all three Lord of the Rings novels combined. Moreover, there was at least one illustration generated for each chapter, and virtually every piece of art was in full color. This presented a number of logistical problems for making a physical edition of the book; at any reasonable font size it would simply be too long, and thus too thick, for a publisher to accommodate. As a result the book was split in half, forming two volumes, so as to make printing feasible. However, that still left the matter of the illustrations. Printing in color about doubled the cost as compared to printing in black and white, with the end result being that even priced at a point with very little profit, it was quite expensive for a reader to purchase.

While established authors can get away with richly printed and illustrated versions of their books, the same is most certainly not true for a first-time and unknown author. Although the digital versions could be, and were, priced at a far more affordable point, it's a big ask to make readers buy two eBooks to read the complete story.

Release and Advertising

When it came time to actually publish Last Fables, no one on our team had any experience with publishing an original story, and I think that inexperience showed. Our former partner had been the artist of a reasonably popular Zootopia fan comic, but that was something with a built-in audience actively seeking out more material set in that universe. Conversely, an original story is a hard sell just to get people to notice it. By one reckoning I saw, about eleven thousand new books are published each and every day, for a total of about four million a year. That’s an overwhelming volume that any newcomer is almost certainly going to drown in, and unfortunately what we tried to stand out didn’t really work very well.

This website was conceived as one of those ways of advertising, with art and blog posts meant to draw potential readers in. However, very little was done before the book was actually launched, and as mentioned it is a big ask to make potential readers buy a self-published book written by a nobody. One of the reasons that we’ve made the entirety of Last Fables available now for free on this website is because this is the model that we’d like to follow for potential future releases. Making the story easily available, with regularly published updates, seems like a better way of drawing an audience.

Lessons Learned

One of the most important lessons we've learned as a result of working on Last Fables is the need for experimentation, both in art and writing. It's easier to get a feeling for characters and the setting if it's possible to play around with them in smaller, easy-to-manage things such as short stories and art pieces not done to the same demanding level as full illustrations. Writing and illustrating a novel is a lengthy and time-consuming process, and as the core of a story is being determined it's helpful to be nimble and capable of iterating. Ideas can be tried out on a small scale, and either discarded if they don't work or elaborated on if they do.

Speaking of elaboration, though, Last Fables was an extraordinarily ambitious project. Before a single word was written of the book itself, the sheer number of events described in the outline should have made it obvious that the story would be extremely long. When the writing started, and each chapter barely chipped away at the outline, there should have been a reassessment of the story as a whole. Although the book is as long as it needs to be in order to tell the story described in the outline, there was no reason that the outline couldn't have been modified to distill the book down to its key elements. A shorter and more tightly-paced story would have been easier to write, illustrate, and read.

Since Last Fables ended, Hiverdose and I have still been working on making new material, taking these lessons we learned and trying to apply them. We greatly appreciate everyone who read the story, and it was always wonderful to get feedback and see what readers thought. As creators, having an audience is an incredible thing, and we are very grateful that you took the time to experience what we made.